Story:Outline
This is an ongoing, constantly revised outline of the story. Naturally, 100% Grade A spoilers. For the outline from a first-person perspective, go here. Act I: The Girl This is the story of how Lily found a strange girl and got caught up in a shady world of conspiracies and mercenaries. Chapter 1: Sara Lily falls in love with a nice college girl. * Jason tells Lily about a party at school and she crashes it. There, she meets Sara. * Lily and Sara hit it off and Lily quickly seduces her. * Their relationship has been going well for several months when Sara tries to track Lily down to see her at work. * At the clinic Lily said she worked at, Sara gets pointed to the brothel. Much to Sara's shock, she learns that Lily is a prostitute. * Sara confronts Lily about it, at work, feeling scandalized and betrayed. * Lily smooths things over, coming clean about her circumstances. Sara ultimately fully accepts Lily. * Lily and Sara plan a spring break vacation together, including, at Sara's insistence, visiting her parents. Lily is prepared to meet them. Chapter 2: The Heist Lily and her friends are hired for a simple job. It's not what it seems and all goes terribly wrong. * The gang - Ty, Manny, and Jason - gets hired for a heist at the Port of Oakland. * Lily insists on taking part, both for the money and to steal medical and printing supplies for the clinic. * The heist goes horribly wrong. Manny takes off in the getaway van with Lily and the package. * Lily insists on knowing what may have just gotten Ty and Jason killed. When she opens the package and finds a girl inside, Manny shoots her and leaves her to die on the floor of the van. * Manny collides with a van full of mercenaries and is killed when he starts shooting at them. * The mercenaries - Rooster, Lansdowne, and Ori - save Lily and the girl, taking them to a street doc. * They restrain Lily after they learn she's wanted for terrorism - setting an anti-psionic bomb at the heist location. * The girl wakes up. She has no idea where she is, where she was, or what her name is. * While Rooster and Lansdowne are out on a job, the street doc attempts to kill Ori (he plans to kill her and Lily and take the girl). Lily escapes and saves her, earning their trust. Chapter 3: On The Run Lily loses the love of her life. She, the mercenaries who saved her, and the girl she was apparently contracted to kidnap make their escape. * They flee, but are soon contacted with a message: "they" have Sara and demand the return of Lily and "the package." Lily insists they turn her over but not the girl. * The baddies torture Sara in front of Lily to extract the location of the package from her. * Lily quickly breaks, but they aren't satisfied with her honest answers and ramp up the torture. * Unbeknownst to Lily, the mercenaries stage a rescue. They save Lily with the help of "the girl", but Sara dies in Lily's arms before they reach help. * With the terrorists and authorities after all of them, they flee. * With the help of Ori's mysterious benefactor/mentor, The Oracle, they acquire fake IDs and make their way to the Pacific Spaceport. * They first flee to Lowell, Mars, where they lay low and search the black market for anti-psionic drugs the girl needs to avoid quintessent breakdown. * Lily starts calling the girl "Cassie" (short for Cassandra), named for the famously gentle psionic diplomat of the Dawn War. * A fixer has a client looking for the drug, so they take a job stealing it for money and a cut of the take. * The Oracle tells them the authorities may be closing in and they should flee the system entirely. * They book passage to Beira. Chapter 4: The New Normal Lily and the new gang settle in on Beira, living a "normal" life of mercenary work. * The Oracle finds them a safehouse on the northern coast of Duglinden. * Rooster finds a fixer to get them jobs to make ends meet and take care of the Cassie. * They settle into doing mercenary work (again). Lily is the face, Rooster the guns, Lansdowne the pilot/driver/rigger, and Ori the hacker. * Most jobs are milk runs, but a couple prove difficult. * Lily has a long string of one-night stands, but can't bring herself to love again after what happened to Sara. * One day, Lily catches a man following her; she thinks They have caught up with her. * After luring him into an alley and beating him senseless, Lily discovers he's a harmless lunatic. He believes Lily is some kind of goddess or something. She lets him go, with her apologies. Chapter 5: Guardians A mysterious group takes Cassie under their protection. The gang scatters to the winds to avoid being found. * The gang gets a job from a quasi-political group: The Children of Llethalen. They are to rescue a psionicist held by a corporation against his will. * The job is a success. When they turn over the psionicist, the CoLl representative says that The Oracle contacted them and said they have another psionicist in need of their protection. * After confirming this with The Oracle, they arrange another meeting, bringing Cassie. Cassie trusts them and the gang turns her over. * The Oracle suggests they part ways now that Cassie no longer needs their protection. It will make it harder for the authorities and the terrorists to track them down. * The Oracle wipes their identities to give them all fresh starts. Somehow - even Ori has no clue how The Oracle accomplishes this. * None of them know where the others are going, for their own protection. Act II: Colony Life Lily starts anew in the colonies. But the multiverse won't let her live a normal life. Chapter 6: Emily Lily finds a wounded girl from the past in her apartment. * Lily makes a new home on the young colony of Anadea. She quickly finds work as a bartender. * Lily meets Zoe, a nurse who lives downstairs from her. * Lily gets home from shopping to find an injured, unconscious girl on the floor of her apartment. * Zoe helps tend to her and they take her to the clinic. * Lily and Zoe lie and say they found her while walking out by the perimeter. Lily convinces them to let her stay with the girl. * The girl, Emily, wakes up very confused. She thinks she's in London, aliens were attacking, and it's 120 years ago. The authorities believe she can't tell reality from nightmares. * The authorities believe she was a victim of metahuman trafficking and either escaped or was discarded. * Lily insists on taking care of her rather than let her fall into the foster care system. With Emily's consent, the authorities let her stay with Lily. * Lily comes to believe Emily about when and where she's from and explains when and where they are now. They establish that Emily was wounded in the Battle of Earth and something put her in suspended animation and transported her to Lily's apartment, for some reason. * Emily accepts her situation and adjusts quickly. Another new normal for Lily - work and taking care of Emily Chapter 7: Love Lily falls in love with another girl. Emily falls in love, too. * Lily meets Eila at work. Eila reminds her of Sara and she soon falls for her. * Meanwhile, Emily spends more and more time hanging out with her new friend Beth. * Emily makes disturbingly insightful remarks and suggestions to Lily about her relationship with Eila. * Despite Lily's bedroom door being nearly soundproof, one day Emily pounds on it and screams her lungs out, begging Lily and Eila to stop having sex. It comes out that Emily is psionic and highly empathic, most relevantly sensitive to sexual arousal. * Despite Emily's objections and fear of anyone finding out her secret, Lily finds her a tutor for her powers. * At work, Lily tries to break up a fight between one of the regulars, Amy, and a group of Alliance soldiers on leave. She becomes friends with Amy after that. * Amy tells Lily tales of the Dawn War and Lily comes to admire her. She also tells Lily about her late wife and what it meant to find love amidst so much death, never sure if either of them would survive to see the next day. * Lily and Eila walk in on Emily and Beth kissing one day. Emily is horribly embarrassed, but Lily is extremely happy for her. Chapter 8: Traffic Eila reaps what Lily sowed with her lie about finding Emily. Lily and Amy take revenge on the slavers. * The authorities start to close in on the human traffickers on Anadea. (They really exist. Who knew?) * There is a massive raid and dozens of traffickers are killed or captured and a respectable number of captives are freed. * Lily comes home from work one night to find Eila dead, nude and mutilated on the floor. "YOU WILL PAY" is cut and burned into her torso with a laser. * The authorities take Lily and Emily into protective custody. Both stay awake all night crying, Emily in psionic sympathy with Lily. * After Lily has finally slept, Amy comes by and bails her out of custody, taking responsibility for her safety. They go to Amy's place, where Amy lays out a revenge plan. * Amy strong-arms a fixer into betraying his trafficker client who contracted the job against Eila and they pursue him - after Lily brutally murders the fixer. * Emily escapes with her psionics and tracks them down, staying out of sight and covertly assisting them. * They massacre the slavers at the second hideout and free even more captives than the authorities did. * The authorities aren't happy, but they just act like Amy and Lily were working under contract so they can take credit. * Lily both respects Emily for what she did and is devastated that Emily has lost what was left of her innocence. Chapter 9: Again Lily and Emily find another wounded girl. Together with Amy they struggle to figure out what's going on. * Lily and Emily move to a new place, though Emily still spends much of her time at Beth's. * Only a few days later, they get home to find a wounded Marine on the floor. With Zoe's help they take her to the clinic to get patched up. * The Marine's name is Zeryn. She is (was) a Za'olan dark elf scout/sniper in the 75th Raiders Regiment who went missing in action on Xian'li. * Lily gets a talking to now that the truth about Emily comes out, but it doesn't matter - Lily was already torturing herself about it. * Emily moves back to the futon and Zeryn takes the second bedroom. Lily and Amy help orient her together. * The authorities are now involved in trying to figure out what happened to both Emily and Zeryn. There are a variety of theories, but none of them productive. New spacetime rifts, acts of a deity, benevolent and mischievous Phfohr, etc. * Emily is at Beth's and Lily has the night off. Lily, Amy, Zoe, and Zeryn all go out drinking. It comes out that Zeryn served with Amy's wife in the 999th Provisional Battalion, a.k.a. Cartwright's Battalion. Lily and Zoe get drunk and hook up. * Lily and Zoe become fuck buddies, hooking up from time to time but most emphatically not dating, nuh uh. It helps Lily forget the pain. Chapter 10: Skyfall The Phfohr return, laying waste to Anadea. Lily and a couple friends barely escape... almost. * Lily awakes to an explosion. Alarms go up around the settlement and Emily comes running in, screaming that it's the aliens. * Amy fights her way to their place with extra weapons - an SMG for Lily and a sniper rifle for Zeryn. * Emily wants to save Beth and Lily wants to save Zoe, so they fight their way to the old apartment building. They arrive just before a hulk overruns the security forces, picks Zoe up in its hand, and smashes her to a pulp against the ground. * They find Beth's family overrun by cryssalids, Beth and her parents zombified. Lily has to put down Beth's shambling corpse as Emily watches. * They manage to fight their way to a ship that a few others have gathered at. The captain won't wait for any more and they take off, fleeing the system. * On their way out of the system, they're boarded by the Phfohr and overwhelmed. Act III: Renegades Through her trials, Lily learns who - and what - she is. She finds herself leading a rogue Alliance ship in a search for some way to help. Chapter 11: Rescue? Lily and the others are rescued from the Phfohr, only for Lily to be captured by the Alliance and mistreated for information. An intelligence operative takes pity on her and helps her friends break her out. * Lily wakes up to being experimented on by the Phfohr, having tissue samples taken. She blacks out. * She next is awoken by a woman; in her confusion she punches her in the face. The two are in a cell and have nothing to do but get to know each other. The other woman is named Felicia. She was a NASA astronaut who last remembers the aliens attacking her Mars outpost in 2045. * The ship is boarded by Alliance Marines, who rescue them and the other prisoners. They are taken back to the [[ASV Elizabeth Szilard|ASV Elizabeth Szilard]] for debriefing, * It comes out that they've lost 2 years. The Phfohr have overrun more colonies and even launched probing attacks against the major systems. The multiverse is at war again. * They are eventually transferred to a nearby hub and taken to Lake-Of-Stars. There, Lily is biometrically identified. She is suspected of bringing the Phfohr back. * Lily is imprisoned and mistreated for information - information she doesn't have. This goes on for weeks, months, close to a year. * At first they try just reading her mind, but every time they look to Anadea they just see Zoe's death, Beth's shambling corpse, and Eila's dead body. When they look for the terrorist activity on Earth, all they see in Manny's betrayal and Sara's death. Chapter 11.5: Rescue. * One of Lily's interrogators, a civilian contractor named Lyssa, takes pity on her. Lyssa grows increasingly disgusted with Lily's mistreatment. * Finally, Lyssa helps the gang, including the original mercenary gang, break Lily out. * Lyssa's father, a general, attempts to kill her to stop the escape. Lily, in her weakened state, manages to kill him first, but not before he badly wounds Lyssa. Rooster dies in the escape. * They flee to a waiting stealth escape ship and leave the system in the confusion. Chapter 12: The Savior Lily is told she's The Savior. She only reluctantly goes along with it. * Lily finds many of the prisoners aboard the ship, including Amy, Emily, Zeryn, and Felicia. * The man who followed Lily before is there, along with a woman. They kneel before her and proclaim her The Savior. Lily lashes out in rage at this. * The rescue was orchestrated by the Vigil Keepers, who keep watch for The Savior, the last of Zoë and Anade DeFrein's bloodline - and that's Lily. * Lyssa recovers and helps Lily with her own recovery. Lily learns that The Savior is supposed to lead them to final victory against the Phfohr. * Lily absolutely rejects the Vigil Keepers' claims about her and refuses to take part in their propaganda efforts. Lansdowne prevails on Lily to do it anyway, if only because it's useful to them. * Emily is scandalized by Lily's cynicism, having only known her idealist side. Emily has grown close with a new girl, Kayla, a Phfohr prisoner from 2051. * Lily has developed feelings for Lyssa. Unfortunately for Lily, Lyssa is straight. Meanwhile, Amy and Zeryn have feelings for each other and are basically together, but Amy also has feelings for Lily and has since back when Lily was with Eila. It's a mess. * The ship is discovered and peacefully boarded by Marines from the [[ASV Maya'an Mayal|ASV Maya'an Mayal]]. Their psionic intelligence officer assesses Lily and the Vigil Keeper psionicists and determines that Lily is, in fact, a descendent of Zoë and Anade. * Captain Tavram offers them all sanctuary aboard the more spacious and better protected Maya'an Mayal. Lily reluctantly accepts under pressure from the others Chapter 13: Ruins Lily takes leadership of a rogue Alliance ship. They search for survivors on Anadea and find a strange device. * The ASV Maya'an Mayal and her crew have effectively gone rogue, harboring the Alliance's most wanted fugitives. * They try to brief Lily and bring her into a position of leadership, but she can't handle the responsibility; she's been broken by her ordeals. * One night Lily drunkenly puts the moves on Lyssa; it doesn't go well. Amy gets her to back off and sit with her and Zeryn instead. Lily's looking to get laid and tries putting the moves on both of them. It eventually works. * Amidst pillow talk, Amy and Zeryn encourage Lily. She's a natural leader, they tell her, there's a reason people have rallied around her, people like Lyssa even, and it's not just because of her heritage. There's something they both see in her. * They travel to Gea, where the civilians disembark to get supplies and some few creature comforts. Lily insists they return to Anadea and search for survivors, more than 3 years after it fell. * They find a few survivors living in the rubble, including Beth's little sister, Sylvie, now hopelessly traumatized and hardened. The Maya'an Mayal takes in the survivors and the other civilians help settle them in. * Ori locates something beneath an impact crater, she's not sure what. On a hunch, Lily orders them to excavate, thinking it might be some Phfohr device. It's a device of some sort, but definitely not Phfohr. * Felicia attempts to study the device and finds it strangely like the hub technology. They gather as much data as they can, then leave before the Phfohr return. * The Maya'an Mayal travels from system to system, raiding stragglers as they go while they await further orders from Lily. The captain and crew grow increasingly restless and discontented at Lily's lack of leadership. * Finally understanding the need to order something, anything, she sends them to another lost colony. They find a few survivors. Though they search, they find no sign of another device. * They go to a third, more developed, more recently devastated colony. There they are confronted by a small task force in orbit. Chapter 14: Posse Lily trades up to leadership of a whole task force. * The flagship of the task force, the ASV Linesse Navassam, demands Captain Tavram and Lily come aboard. There, Commodore McAlister awaits them, angry. The Commodore is Sara's father, and he's furious with Lily for what happened to her. He punches Lily, hard, and orders her imprisoned. * The Alliance knows the Maya'an Mayal has gone rogue. What Captain Tavram has done borders on treason. * Despite the Commodore's treatment of Lily, the rest of the crew who interact with her, interrogating her, are entirely humane, even kind at times. * Lily tearfully opens up about everything. She begs Commodore McAlister to let her friends go on their way. At one point, she begs him to kill her and end the torment of what happened. * One day she is unexpectedly released. Lily's interrogators became convinced of her honesty and that she was the real deal. Commodore McAlister grudgingly accepts Lily's contrition. He understands who she is and, being a religious man, he reluctantly pledges his allegiance to her. * After concluding rescue operations, the full task force returns to Anadea to properly study the device. The Phfohr are waiting; in a pitched battle, the task force defeats them without losing any ships. * While studying the device, they receive an emergecy message broadcast through the hubs to all systems: Gea has fallen and the system remains occupied. Chapter 15: Grasping Lily grasps at straws. Cassie hurts herself trying to get information from the device, they almost go to war trying to get Federation help. * Cassie insists on studying the device. She says she can feel it calling her. Lily reluctantly let's her. * Cassie touches the device and immediately collapses in a seizure. She doesn't wake until they leave the system weeks later. She says she touched minds with someone or something and was overwhelmed by knowledge and feelings. She can't grasp much of it. * Cassie authoritatively (for once) demands they return to Beira. They can't return, though, not with the gates locked down and the Alliance certainly knowing the whole task force has gone rogue. * Instead, Lily sends another broadcast through the internal gates. Kayla was able to scry the location of the device on Beira. Lily includes that in the broadcast along with a call for resistance and, shockingly, a plea to rally behind the Alliance in this time of need, whatever its flaws. * Lily insists they need the Federation's help again. To say the Federation is unreceptive would be an understatement; it's a wonder they don't come to blows. * The task force slinks away and resumes prowling for individual Phfohr ships or small packs. Act IV Chapter 16: Ision They find an uncontacted world: Ision. They return home from there to find the Alliance greatly weakened. * One hub seems stuck - they can't open it from the ships - so they enter it to open it manually. Lily insists on going just because she feels like it; they will cater to her whims. Lily also feels like entering the next hub address - she'd never worked a hub before. * Lily mistypes the address. The exterior gate doesn't open, but the interior gate opens to a beautiful, well maintained park. People, possibly tourists, stare, frightened and awestruck. * It's a never-contacted world, spacefaring with warp drives but without access to a spaceborne hub or a means to open their terrestrial hub from their side. * Lily gets stuck being a diplomat to them with Emily translating for her. They take a liking to Lily personally and soon she's speaking to global audiences. * The planet, Ision, is advanced and fairly peaceful. They've never heard of the Phfohr, or the Federation, or any alien life or other metahuman planets. * After several weeks, they leave Ision. They leave behind a diplomatic contingent and Ision sends some observers to join the task force. * It's been months and the task force needs resupply. Out of desperation, they open a gate to Beira. * What remains of the Alliance forces lets them through. The Alliance held off a major Phfohr attack, but took heavy losses Chapter 17: The Trial Lily goes on trial for her crimes, everything from murder and treason to conspiracy and espionage. * Due to their actions making first contact and notifying them of the device still being researched, the Alliance will allow the task force to continue operating semi-autonomously. However, they demand they turn over Lily. * Lily agrees, provided they give her a few hours. She has one last fling with Amy and Zeryn and says her goodbyes. * Most of the civilians choose to leave and settle on Beira, including Emily and Kayla. Felicia, Ori, and Cassie join the team studying the device. * Lily faces a tribunal. A long and arduous trial plays out while the Phfohr regroup and take more worlds. * The prosecutors want Lily, they don't care much about the others since she's the leader and mastermind in their book. * While being transported between the court and the brig, Lily is attacked, her assailant screaming that she's an imposter and devil-spawn. She is critically wounded and one Marine is killed protecting her. * In her wounded delirium, Lily conducts a tribunal on herself, as it were, tormenting herself with everyone from her past who suffered and died. * The day of closing arguments, news arrives that Earth has fallen. The way things are going, Lily fully expects life in prison. * After a tenday of deliberations, Lily gets her verdict: she is acquitted of all charges and free to go. With what happened to Earth, she can't muster any joy. * The task force is gone, stranding Lily on Beira. Progress on studying the device has completely stalled. Everywhere Lily goes, people stare at her with awe; they bow their heads or clutch their hearts or gasp with a hand over their mouths. It sickens Lily. Chapter 18: Crash Things fall apart - Lily, Cassie, Amy, they all fall apart in some way. * Lily visits the device. When she touches it, she feels faint and collapses. She falls into a fever dream of intimacy with the Eveskan goddess of love. * Lily awakes in the hospital. At first she mistakes the nurse for Zoe. She's surrounded by flowers and get well cards; it makes her sick. The doctor lets her go but orders her to say away from the device. * The task force returns. The ASV Maya'an Mayal does not. It was lost in battle, including Captain Tavram... and Amy. * Lily buys a half dozen bottles of salmeth, goes home, and drinks herself into a stupor, sobbing the whole time. She comes to face down in her vomit a week later with Emily pounding on the door. Emily coaxes Lily to clean herself up and come back out into the world. * Lily decides she's going to throw her life away and tries to enlist in the Alliance Marine Corps. They won't let her enlist - she's too valuable. They'd prefer she take a prominent morale position. She tries to see if the Sword Sisters will take her. The priestess tells her that her destiny is so much greater. * After another good talking to from Emily, Lily tries approaching the Alliance brass directly. No dice, only "morale." She appeals directly to Commodore McAlister. She gets a maybe, we'll see. * Cassie has the idea of merging their knowledge of the devices, even though Lily doesn't remember receiving any. They get a psi medical team to watch over them and Cassie grabs Lily tight. * Lily snaps awake, babbling in tongues. She's in the hospital again; Cassie is in the next bed, comatose and, according to the psionicists, completely sapped of her power. Lily tries to tell the Alliance what she remembers, but it's too much and slips through her fingers. * Her head hurts, her soul hurts, and Lily just wants to die all over again. In a weird reversal, she goes to a brothel for comfort; she tips well after she cries in bed. Chapter 19: Frienemies An old friend becomes a new enemy. * Lyssa takes Lily to 'where it all began,' the site of the Symmetry Breaking in Duglinden, for a talk. Lily rejects her heritage and refuses to accept that she's anything like her great grandmothers. * Lyssa comforts Lily and sexual awkwardness happens between them, Lily putting the moves on Lyssa in her anguish. * More news: Tellios has come under attack, but remains standing, also with heavy losses. * Kayla and Emily meet Lily and Lyssa when they return to Eveska, Kayla babbling about a vision she had: Ision will be attacked through their planetbound hub. * Cassie wakes from her coma, completely mundane and crying with joy at that. She withdraws from further participation on account of being useless and seeks to settle into a normal life on Eveska. * Lily goes to Ision with the 10th Rifles Regiment, a research team, a hub engineering team, and an expanded diplomatic team, along with Lyssa, Emily, Kayla, and Brigadier Taimal. The hub engineering team gets a control device connected, allowing them to open the gate from that side. * One day the gate opens - it's the Federation with a lot of troops. There's a tense standoff; the Federation plays chicken and wins. They continue moving troops in and it becomes clear they intend to attack. * It's unclear who shoots first - the Alliance, the Federation, or Isioni forces - but the situation explodes. Together, the Alliance and Ision drive the Federation back through the gate. * Lily joins in the fighting and is badly wounded by railgun fire. * They send a message to Alliance HQ: the Federation is now an enemy. They receive a reply: Xian'li has fallen - shortly after being approached by the Federation. * Ision is unsure how to treat the Alliance at this point - the Alliance gave many lives protecting them, but likely drew the Federation to them in the first place. * When Lily recovers enough, she pleads for unity - neither the Federation not the Phfohr will rest until they're conquered, them and every other metahuman planet. Act V Chapter 20: Eden * Lily awakes one day with an idea, a compulsion, and a hub address in her head. She goes to the gate and enters it, revealing the surface of a devastated world. She walks through, escorts insisting on following her. The architecture reminds her of the hubs and she feels like she'd been there before. * She follows her instincts and finds a bunker. She makes her way inside to a chamber. A device flashes and pops. Suddenly, standing behind Lily is... Sara? * Lily attacks her, demanding to know what she is. She doesn't resist. Emily feels her pain and fear and stops Lily. * "Sara" identifies herself as one of the Creators, a species that oversaw humanity's (and other species') progress in ages past. Despite Lily's anger, "Sara" is friendly and cheerful, if shy and awkward. She apologizes for offending Lily - she had been rendered incorporeal for stasis and the device that regenerated her was designed to choose a form the one finding it found pleasing and trustworthy. * Lily asks what to call "Sara"; she says she can't remember her name, so Lily can call her whatever she wants. Lily settles on "Eve." * Eve tells how the Creators built the hubs, their greatest inorganic achievement. They manipulated the progress of humanity, the Phfohr, and the Federation races. Eve is horrified that their progeny are all fighting for each other's destruction. * Eve also tells how their destruction came about. There was a civil war between the Observers, like her, and the Masters. The Observers sought to observe their progeny from a distance and only make subtle interventions in their progress, little nudges toward uplift. The Masters sought to openly and forcefully bend their progeny to their will. The Observers severed the Awakened Universe from the Origin Universe to protect at least some of humanity for good. The devastation spread and both sides deployed superweapons. Eve never witnessed the end of the war, but if they are no longer around, presumably both sides completely desroyed each other. * They bring Eve back to Ision, where the research and medical teams gently study her, an odd reversal. They find that she is, as far as anyone can tell, a normal, mundane human woman. They ask her about her true form; she dismisses it as irrelevant, she is who she is now and forever more. * Eve is awestruck by Ision and the Alliance people - humanity has come so far from what she last heard, barely figuring out agriculture. * Eve offers to implement a long-dormant security measure in the hubs, meant to ensure the worlds stayed separate unless Creators were traveling through, a form of encryption or key of sorts. Alliance HQ grudgingly, desperately accepts her help. Chapter 21: Human * On Beira, Eve begs Lily to teach her how to be human, how to live as a human, and what that means after all this time. * One night, Lily takes Eve out drinking to show her what a good time is like. Lily forgets she isn't Sara and tries to make out with her. It ends with Lily sobbing when she remembers that Sara's dead. * The Alliance questions Eve extensively about the other races, hoping to learn weaknesses they may be unaware of. She says the species have certainly developed in unpredictable ways - they never saw metahumans coming from humans, even, nor psionics. * Eve confesses to Lily that she's way out of her depth. She's not a researcher - she's just a young Creator, barely an adult, whose parents had enough pull to get her saved from the end that way. * Word gets out about Eve somehow and now the fawning and prayers toward Lily are the least of their worries. One day they flee a crowd into a Temple of Love; the priestess offers them sanctuary. * Eve is very inquisitive of their religious beliefs. She wants to know how the metahumans make sense of the multiverse. Her own people had vaguely pantheistic beliefs, seeing divinity in everything. The priestess explains the Eveskan pantheon to her and for comparison Lily explains Anadean religion. Eve finds both fascinating, especially that Lily has a living role in one of them. * Eve asks Lily what she personally believes. Lily says she's not sure, but she had a vision. She explains her intimacy with the goddess of Love when she touched the device. * Eve soon comes to believe that the entire Eveskan pantheon is Creators, Observer researchers who stored their consciousnesses in the device rather than abandon their "children" when the universe was sealed off. She believes their apparent magical qualities are from how the quintessence changed them. Lily at least gets her to hush up about it, but she insists on spending time with the device, praying with various clergy, and generally trying to talk to the 17 Creators she believes are in there. Chapter 22: Mother * The Alliance goes to send a force reconnaissance team through the interior gate to Mimas. When they open it, the Phfohr are ready with hostages blocking the way. In a tense standoff they send one hostage through and demand the gate closes or they'll kill the others. The Alliance complies. * The woman is horribly traumatized. She cries about how Phfohr soldiers patrol the streets, kidnapping people and experimenting on them, sometimes returning them changed or mutilated, horrors not seen since the Liberation of Xian'li in the Dawn War. After she's examined and treated, Lyssa talks to her to see what she can gather. * Lyssa invited Lily to help. Big mistake. The woman is Kate McAlister, Sara's mother. She attacks Lily on sight; Lily doesn't resist, only cries and begs forgiveness. Eve is with Lily and the second Kate catches sight of her she stops. She grows violent again when they explain what Eve is. * A tenday later, after finishing debriefing and being released with a protective escort, she finds Lily and Eve. She speaks to Eve alone and is satisfied with what she hears. She then talks to Lily; she apologizes for her outburst, then asks about her time with Sara. * As they're talking, a bright white light tears through the sky near Selen. The exterior gate has been destroyed by a well-placed thermonuclear bomb; one placed by the interior gate is defused at the last second.